This is literally targeting the Americans specifically and killing them.

This cannot be done in this way.

This is truly an extraordinary shift – it really highlights, by the way, that this isn’t just a left-or-right, Republican versus Democrat problem, this is something else altogether.

- Former CIA Special Agent Jack Rice

Nelson, a 44-year-old white woman, keeps getting snared at the Canadian border because she apparently shares some key identifying information with a black man, possibly from Georgia, who is in trouble with the law. While such cases of mistaken identity at border points and airports are not unique, Nelson’s case is unusual in that only some of her crossings set off an alarm and because federal officials have not fixed the problem after almost two years.

- NY woman questioned again and again over ID mix-up

The accuracy of a bureaucracy’s database is inversely proportional to the number of records on file.

He asked who I was working for. I said I’m a freelance photojournalist working on assignment for ProPublica. He asked for verification of that so I showed him the letter from (ProPublica senior editor) Susan White. Officer Krietemeyer took down the information. Mr. Robison tried to dig at what the article was about, and I stayed mostly vague because I’m not the writer and I didn’t see the significance anyway. Eventually he asked if it’s about BP and I said yes, which seemed to make him angrier.

I then felt like Mr. Robison and Mr. Stief, the BP guard, started harassing me, primarily by keeping me there and talking to me in an aggressive and antagonistic manner, and relating what I had done to terrorist activity, ignoring what had actually happened. This went on for some time.

- ProPublica Photographer: I Was Followed by BP Security and Then Detained by Police

Homeland security can’t happen without your cooperation/intimidation/subjugation.

Corexit, a dispersant, is being sprayed into the Gulf to break down the oil. The safety data information sheet from the manufacturer states that people should “avoid breathing in vapor” from Corexit, and that masks should be work when Corexit is present in certain concentrations in the air.

BP has not supplied workers with masks when they work near the oil and dispersants.

. . .

According to Guidry from the shrimpers’ association, BP told workers they were not allowed to wear masks.

“Some of our men asked, and they were told they’d be fired if they wore masks,” he said.

Tony Hayward, the chief executive officer of BP, offered another explanation for the fishermen’s illness: spoiled food.

- Fisherman files restraining order against BP

Taken straight from the playbook…

… at least not if the religious right has its way:

There is Campus Crusade for Christ’s Military Ministry, which has a permanent staff presence at U.S. military academies and whose directors have referred publicly to U.S. soldiers and Marines as “government-paid missionaries.” Such groups, Weinstein argues, “are the flip side of the Taliban. They’re like Islamic officers exercising Quranic leadership to raise a jihadi army.”

- Mikey Weinstein’s Crusade
at ForeignPolicy.com

via TYWKIWDBI

Ready to hunt men for Christ?

You’ll need your Bible verse sniper scope…

Suffice it to say that, in all my experience, 43 years, there has been one seat change in our body politic and that I would suggest is the fact is that we no longer have a “free media” in any meaningful sense of the term.

You have to really try, you have to go out of your way, to get the real story – and most Americans are working two jobs or taking care of their kids and they get home at night and they put their feet up and they think that they’re getting news from the likes of Fox News and they’re of course getting anything else but news – they’re getting the kind of thing we used to get on Radio Moscow … they’re getting a steady diet of disinformation.

- Interview with 27-Year CIA Veteran Ray McGovern

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain – or this guy.

Two years ago, the FCC ruled that Comcast could not block online content, and Comcast challenged the ruling in court. Today, the court ruled in Comcast’s favor, effectively placing the Internet in the hands of big phone and cable companies.

This decision exploits a loophole in current law — the result of overzealous deregulation by the Bush administration — that threatens Net Neutrality and leaves the FCC unable to achieve the crucial goals of the National Broadband Plan.

- SaveTheInternet.com E-mail

Ah, loopholes… go to the petition form to help close this one up – before it becomes a noose.

“At this time, we are working to verify the source of the video, its veracity, and when or where it was recorded,” a statement from U.S. military headquarters in Iraq said late Monday.

An investigation of the shooting found that the crew of the two Apache helicopters at the scene might have erroneously identified photographer’s cameras as weapons, NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski reported.

According to U.S. officials, the pilots arrived to find a group of men approaching the area of a battle with what looked to be AK-47s slung over their shoulders and at least one rocket-propelled grenade.

The investigation later concluded that what was thought to be an RPG was really a long-range photography lens; likewise, the camera looked like an AK-47.

- U.S. pilot seen firing on people in Iraq

When all you have is a minigun, everything looks like a target…

Life in a city is inherently chaotic – granted, there are laws which govern how everything behaves and, given enough information, it would be possible to simulate every possible scenario and discern what’s happening from the quanta in an electron which composes a polymer in the plastic seat your ass is parked in to the thoughts of the person sitting next to you on the subway – but survival is generally not of grave concern at a given moment… until it is.

… and when your life depends upon situational awareness, you can count on your five senses (along with that sixth sense of cognitive dissonance) but little else: those entrusted with maintaining control over critical situations will restrict the availability of viable information if that’s as much control as they’ve got.

The person sitting next to you? Probably thinking about dinner or the events of the day or what’ll be on the television… but he or she could be thinking about the thirty-pound bundle of explosives and shrapnel in his or her satchel – and you’d be none the wiser if you were depending upon local law enforcement to clue you in to a terrorist attack.

Announcements informed passengers of delays due to “technical reasons,” avoiding anything more specific.

- Suicide bombers kill 38 in Moscow’s subway at MSNBC
2010-03-28

Containment has failed. Keep them calm. Avoid panic.

“It’s tied in with self-esteem,” says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. “We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels.”

- Why We Lie at Tehran Times
2010-03-09

Preserve the façade of safety. Everything is under control.

Control requires complicit obedience and conditioned responses (the kind which a novel situation would preclude) – some situations must be down-played to prevent stampedes and ensure continuity, even if that means stifling the truth and inviting further casualties: the governing organism which demands freedom in exchange for security must not be exposed for its lies.

[via Before It's News]